Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
his beloved South upon the rocks. A truly notable figure was this
ascetic Carolinian. In the passionate debates over slavery he daily
matched powers with Webster and Clay and proved himself intellectually
the greatest of the three. He is the one outstanding political thinker
in a period singularly barren and uncreative. His influence was
commanding. Tall, lean, eager, with no humor, no playfulness, lacking
the magnetic personality of Clay and the ornate rhetoric of Webster,
speaking plainly and following his logic tenaciously, this gaunt
Scotch-Irishman became by virtue of intellect and character, driven by
an apostolic zeal, the master political mind of the South, an uncrowned
king who carried his native Carolina in his pocket like a rotten
borough. Long before his death he had expanded a political philosophy
into a school of thought. What he planned a hundred disciples hastened
to execute. Like Jefferson he was a pervasive influence in shaping
men’s opinions. It was impossible to ignore him or to escape the
admonitory finger that pointed at every weak and shuffling compromiser.
Whatever road one travels one comes at last upon the austere figure of
Calhoun, commanding every highway of the southern mind. He subjected
the philosophy of the fathers to critical analysis; pointed out
wherein he conceived it to be faulty; cast aside some of its most
sacred doctrines; provided another foundation for the democratic
faith which he professed. And when he had finished the great work of
reconstruction, the old Jeffersonianism that had satisfied the mind of
Virginia was reduced to a thing of shreds and patches, acknowledged
by his followers to have been a mistaken philosophy, blinded by
romantic idealism and led astray by French humanitarianism. To
substitute realism for idealism, to set class economics above abstract
humanitarianism, was the mission to which Calhoun devoted himself. He
undid for the plantation South the work of his old master. Speaking
in the name of democracy, he attacked the foundations on which the
democratic movement in America had rested, substituting for its
libertarian and equalitarian doctrines conceptions wholly alien and
antagonistic to western democracy, wholly Greek in their underlying
spirit.
Calhoun’s career was linked indissolubly with slavery. He was the
advocate and philosopher of southern imperialism, and in defense of
that imperialism he elaborated those particularist theories which
prepared the way for the movement of secession. Born and bred in
South Carolina, he was enveloped from infancy in the mesh of southern
provincialisms. Except for two years at Yale, where he graduated in the
class of 1804, and eighteen months reading law in Connecticut, his life
was spent between Washington and his plantation. He was in temperament
a Puritan, of that Scotch-Irish strain which, scattered along the
wide American frontier, greatly modified the American character and
gave to the South such different leaders as Stonewall Jackson and
Jefferson Davis. It was a hard, stern race--that Scotch-Irish--little
responsive to humanitarian appeal; and Calhoun was harder and sterner
than most. He held his emotions in strict subjection to his reason.
Intent on thinking every problem through from premise to conclusion,
concerned always with fundamental principles, he would have become,
in an environment congenial to humanistic thought, a distinguished
intellectual. His mind would have lost its rigidity and become pliable
from contact with diverse streams of theory, and his speculations would
have found new horizons from more generous intellectual acquisitions.
But unhappily there was nothing either at Washington or in South
Carolina that tended to liberalize his thinking. He had not gone to
school, as Jefferson had done, to the great thinkers of Europe; he
had not found an intellectual stimulus in revolutionary systems of
philosophy. He dwelt all his life in the arid world of politicians.
His two years at Yale may even be accounted a calamity. Timothy Dwight
and Calhoun were cut out of the same cloth. The South Carolina Puritan
would only be confirmed in his dogmatisms by the most dogmatic of
Yankee Puritans; and in consequence his career, like Jonathan Edwards’,
suffered from a narrow, ingrowing intellectualism. He was a potential
intellectual whose mind was unfertilized by contact with a generous
social culture.
Calhoun’s public life covered the forty years from 1810 to 1850,
from the first administration of Madison to that of Zachary Taylor.
For nearly half of the total period, up to the year 1828, he was a
politician of ability but without distinction. He entered Congress at a
time when the young men from the South and West were becoming impatient
with the cautious policy of the old Republicans led by Jefferson and
Madison. The war psychology was mounting under British pin-pricks,
and the young nationalists, forgetful that bayonets and cannon and
ships are not easily defeated by rhetoric, were eager to teach the
Mistress of the Seas some much-needed international manners. In those
early years Calhoun joined with Clay in driving through Congress a war
policy. In this he seems to have represented his constituents, whose
patriotism was always somewhat bellicose. During the shameful war
experience, the cool analytical Calhoun came near to exhibiting the
tawdry marks of the jingo; and thereafter for years there was little to
distinguish him from a Hamiltonian Federalist. He was a throughgoing
nationalist of the school of loose construction. He advocated a
protective tariff on the ground that “it would form a new and most
powerful cement, far outweighing any political objections that might be
urged against the system” (Gaillard Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 29). As
yet he had discovered no constitutional scruples against the exercise
of this or other implied powers. He was, he said, “no advocate for
refined arguments on the Constitution. The instrument is not intended
as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on. It ought to
be construed with plain, good sense; and what can be more express than
the Constitution on this point?” (_ibid._, p. 30). As Secretary for War
in Monroe’s cabinet he was an advocate of internal improvements, and he
submitted to Congress an elaborate report on a proposed system of roads
and canals. Until the critical year 1828 there was little in Calhoun’s
career to distinguish him from Clay. The tide of national expansion was
running strong; the growth of exploitation was creating a middle-class
psychology; and Calhoun in these earlier years was as unconsciously
middle class as afterwards he became consciously aristocratic. He
sprang from an acquisitive race, and to the end of his life some
remnants of the old instincts clung to him despite his repudiation of
the middle-class political philosophy.
The year 1828, marked by a fierce discussion in South Carolina of
the Tariff of Abominations, proved the turning-point of his career.
As Vice President he had been little more than a spectator of the
growing discontent in his native state at the contrast between the
industrial prosperity of New England and the agricultural depression of
the South. But he could no longer remain an idle spectator. Pamphlets
and newspaper articles were appearing that sharply challenged his
position. Capitalistic Federalism and democratic equalitarianism were
equally under fire. The celebrated Dr. Cooper, an Englishman long
resident in South Carolina, who had suffered under the Alien and
Sedition law, had vigorously attacked the natural-rights dogma, and was
active in arousing the public mind against Calhoun’s consolidationist
tendencies.[402] The publication in 1821 of Yates’s _Minutes of Debates
of the Constitutional Convention_ had awakened widespread interest in
an historical interpretation of the Constitution, and the time was
ripe for a new period of constitutional debate. The tariff act of 1828
provided the immediate occasion. It opened the flood gates, and the
waters of states-rights doctrine that had long been gathering rushed
forth in a torrent. Calhoun hesitated no longer. The problem and the
solution had both clarified themselves in his mind, and he at once took
the lead in directing the unrest to achieve a definite end.
Calhoun’s contribution to political theory--a contribution that
elevates him to a distinguished place among American political
thinkers--was the child of necessity, and received its particularist
bias from the exigencies of sectional partisanship. With the rapid
expansion of the nation westward, and the consequent augmenting of a
potentially hostile free-soil power, the South was doomed to become
increasingly a minority voice in the councils of government; and if it
were to preserve its peculiar institution it must find more adequate
means of self-protection than it had enjoyed hitherto. The tendencies
most to be feared, in his judgment, were the spontaneous drift towards
consolidation, and an uncritical faith in numerical majorities.
He was convinced that America had too thoughtlessly accepted the
principle of political democracy as a sufficient safeguard against
the danger of arbitrary government. Soon or late it must discover,
what the South already was discovering, that numerical democracy,
unrestrained by constitutional limitations on its will, is no friend
to political justice. The critical test of every government is the
measure of protection afforded its weakest citizen; and judged by this
test a democratic state, when power has come to be centralized in few
hands, may prove to be no other than a tyrant. Irresponsible in its
unrestraint, the majority vote may easily outdo an Oriental despot
in arbitrary rule, and the more power it wields the more ruthless
will be its disregard of minority opinion. The political philosopher
who proposes to formulate an ideal democratic system of government,
therefore, must deal critically with this fundamental problem of
political justice, for upon the solution will turn the excellence and
permanence of every democracy. It was to this baffling problem that
Calhoun addressed himself.
In seeking a constitutional defense for the threatened southern
interests, he drew from the two great reservoirs of American
constitutional theory. From the Jeffersonian Republicans he derived his
familiar doctrine of states rights in opposition to the consolidating
principle; from the Federalists of the Montesquieu school he drew his
theory of static government, resulting from exactly balanced powers;
and from the amalgamation of these diverse theories he formulated a new
principle. Both schools of earlier thought, he had come to believe, had
been sound in their major premises, but both had gone astray in certain
important deductions. The experience of forty years, with the democracy
constantly augmenting its powers, had demonstrated to Calhoun’s
satisfaction both the grave danger that lay in the principle of
consolidation, and the insufficiency of existing checks on the Federal
government. The prime mistake of the Jeffersonians, he conceived, was
their belief that the democratic majority will necessarily serve the
cause of political justice; and the miscalculation of the Federalists
resulted from the belief that the division of powers provided in the
Constitution was adequate to prevent arbitrary government. He now
proposed to correct these two mistakes by providing an additional
check through the simple expedient--as logical as it was efficacious,
granted his premises--of recognizing the veto power of the individual
commonwealth upon an act of the Federal government. Stripped of its
states-rights limitation, this was in germ the principle of the
referendum, modified, however, by certain suggestive provisions.